


prelude to an actual resolution

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16413341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: "Each mainstream political party in the United States is equally responsible for the degradation of national civility."





	prelude to an actual resolution

**Author's Note:**

> [Guys, this year I'm peddling fanfic in exchange for donations to Democrats running in the midterm elections!](http://skrtomg.tumblr.com/post/178770234165/fic-for-time-votes)
> 
> I wrote this fic for [invader-sam](https://www.deviantart.com/invader-sam), who requested Cartman/Wendy: "something with the two of them, maybe in debate club senior year of highschool?" She made a donation to [Linda Fields](https://www.fields4senate.com/), a great candidate who's running for the Pennsylvania State Senate. It's easy to get caught up in the national picture, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but don't forget that plenty of amazing people are running to represent you at the state and local levels.
> 
> Election day is **Tuesday, November 6**. Please vote!

“He looks awful. "

“He looks objectively awful,” Wendy agrees, “but I kind of like it.”

Bebe nods, uncurls her fingers from the plastic, looks at the condensation, wipes them on her jeans. “The heart wants,” is all she manages.

Wendy walks home across the soggy green, not yet snowed over; through leaf-laden yards, because personal property is God in Colorado, unless it’s a small town where every home is built on the same blueprints, so what’s one living room from another, one stucco façade against your own? Bebe has taken to doing this lately, dropping the second half of her clichés to make herself sound deep.

This one sticks, needling Wendy’s conscious as she comes in through the back door and tamps the mud off on the mat. “The heart” is a bit dramatic, but the wanting—

Wendy lugs her bookbag upstairs and registers no surprise, along with gratitude, that her parents aren’t home. They go to Costco on Sunday afternoons, and the closest is in Littleton. No one’s there to ask how studying went.

* * *

Debate is no fun lately. There’s no quitting, though, not when your public high school offers no AP classes and you hear autumn in New England is delightful.

“What’s your problem?” greets Wendy at the door.

“I don’t have a problem.” She has dozens.

“I texted you like, once or twice—”

“Or eighty times.”

“Then why didn’t you reply?”

“I had my phone off.”

“Aha! If you had your phone off, you wouldn’t know how many times I texted!”

She rolls her eyes, unzipping her backpack to pull out her notes, her library books, the Kind bar she plans to eat, a pencil case. “I turned it on again later, obviously.”

“Just talk to me, Wendy.”

It’s like having a baby, she thinks, except it’s worse, because a baby can be put in a crib and left in another room. It’s worse than having a dog—she thinks of Stan’s, which used to slobber on her pants and leave stray hairs on her knit gloves. But you can shut a door if it’s a dog, she tells herself. It doesn’t follow you around the debate classroom while you try to get ready.

This is what I get for being early, she thinks. It’s this or it’s being unprepared. Which is worse?

When Kyle comes in, Wendy notices tawny bristle clinging to the hem of his fleece pullover. What he does in his free time is none of her business, and she’s not even interested per se—but small town, small lives, and the smaller the life the easier it is to know, and before it’s too late she’s catching the stench of low-quality coffee or new shoes, or spying split capillaries under a wristwatch, or that Heidi is layering her hayride look with a jean jacket over a hoodie that Wendy could have sworn Kevin used to wear in middle school.

Wendy just knows those pervasive, needling hairs; she would be lying if she didn’t, on occasion, still find them in the seam of her underwear drawer or the lip of the boot tray by the back door.

“I don’t think this is going to be too hard,” Kyle says, shaking his tablet from his backpack and beginning to set up an overly elaborate workstation. His bag is a metaphor: a tangle of USB cables he needs to unwind before he can even get down to business. “It’s always easier to argue these things when you actually believe in them.”

“Oh, you can’t actually believe that.” Because she can’t, really.

“I can’t?”

“No,” Wendy says. “Because to actually believe this would be reprehensible.”

“Okay,” he says, plugging the keyboard into its port. “Well, we just have different opinions.”

“But your opinion is wrong!”

“How can my opinion be _wrong_? It’s my opinion!”

“She means don’t be a doormat, Kyle.”

“I’m not!”

“Yeah.” Eric rolls his eyes, sighs heavily, shifts his weight, performs exasperation like he wasn’t just performing desperation, like he’s ever had a genuine emotion in his life.

“Can we just write this argument?”

“Whatever you want, Jew.”

“Don’t call me that!”

Eric’s lips bend into something unsettling and he says, “Yes, well.”

“I will put a put a fist in your mouth if you don’t shut up.”

“So I think Wendy’s got a point.” (She also hates how bored he sounds when he talks.) “You wanna tell me about civility? What’d you find?”

“Ugh.” Kyle plops down and starts smashing buttons. Then he grits out, “I’ll send you an e-mail.”

* * *

It’s dark when they head out, piling their books at the bottoms of their lockers and wrapping themselves in November-weight water resistance. 

“Thanks for sticking up for me,” Wendy says, soft, so that their nonexistent fellow students, who’ve already fled the building, don’t catch it. So that the version of her that’s already checked out of this situation and on the other side of the country in her fantasies can’t hear it, either.

“I’m not sticking up for you,” he says. “I’m sticking up for what I believe in.”

“And what is that?”

“Being right.”

He looks horrible.

* * *

Wendy writes _civility_ on the first blank page in her notebook and cringes at her own writing: round, squat, and full. It’s worse than the slope of her lower body in profile or the fact that her name is Wendy because she should be able to control her handwriting. It shouldn’t be a tell. It should be like her desires: buried, not public.

Well, she tells herself, it’s not like there aren’t forms of communication where you don’t use handwriting? Aren’t pixels the great equalizer?

_I guess it just bothers me because “being civil” is this double standard where people like women and other communities without a lot of power have traditionally been forced to act “civil” as a means of contributing to their own oppression_. She takes a deep breath. Crosses her legs. Taps her long fingernails on the surface of her desk. Adds, _I mean I’ll argue anything I have to and do a good job but I think Kyle of all people is nuts if he thinks “civility” is anything other than a coded way to passively ask for basic things like human rights_.

She hits “send.”

_He’s a hypocrite_ , Eric writes back as she’s working on her functions homework. _Most Jews are. Plus he’s a pussy._

Wendy writes, _Hypocritical, sure, but don’t call people pussies._

She stares as her phone for what, thirty seconds? And it seems like an eternity before he replies, _Yeah well yours is pretty cool._

Which has less than nothing to do with anything, even though she’s squeezing her thighs together now, and it makes her want to melt into a puddle, sink into the bruised surface of the earth, and never be heard from in South Park again.

**Author's Note:**

> Small donations make a huge difference in politics, so if you're thinking about making a donation to a great Democratic candidate, hit me up at sekritomg @ gmail and we'll talk about what I can write for you. [More info is here.](http://skrtomg.tumblr.com/post/178770234165/fic-for-time-votes) And don't forget to vote!


End file.
